The Alberta government is axing provincial achievement tests for grades 3, 6 and 9, phasing them out in favour of a new student assessment it says will offer better information to parents and teachers, but shed the “high stakes” reputation of the current regime.

It’s a move that, according to one expert, the rest of Canada and even the world will be watching closely, as it is geared to helping individual students improve, whereas most testing focuses solely on exit exams or how the system is doing.

The first step will be to pilot the Student Learning Assessment with Grade 3 pupils, beginning in the fall of 2014. The full rollout to test all students at that grade will follow in 2015.

Instead of writing provincial achievement tests in May and June, students will be assessed at the beginning of the school year so results can be used to adjust teaching and help the child improve.

The tests will be conducted digitally, and are being touted as more “student friendly.”

They will be broken up into smaller segments and, because they are done on computer, results will be available quickly, giving parents and teachers a timely sense of how a child is faring.

Similar changes will follow for grades 6 and 9, with pilots beginning in 2015 and 2016, respectively.

The new assessments are meant to better probe literacy and numeracy, along with “competencies” such as creativity, critical thinking and problem solving.

“One of things that we heard was that we needed to evolve the way we, as a province, assess how students are doing so that it benefits kids, not just so that we have a number to report at the end of the year,” Education Minister Jeff Johnson said Thursday.

The changes are being heralded by the provincial teachers association, the school boards association, and a major parent group.

The achievement tests have been a bugbear for the Alberta Teachers’ Association and some parents, who complain they inflict unnecessary stress.

There’s also been controversy over the use of data by the Fraser Institute, which annually ranks schools with the help of test scores.

Current provincial achievement test results are publicly reported, by school. That won’t change, the minister said, and the “benchmarking” will remain.

He couldn’t detail what the reporting will look like, but said the province may even make more information available. He said the accountability to parents, school officials and taxpayers will remain.

John Rymer, a former director of assessment at Alberta Education, says if the assessment reveals data on a child’s literacy and numeracy skills, then steps can be taken early on in the school year to help the student.

“It’s going to be an intriguing and it’s going to be a very interesting approach to assessment,” Rymer said.

“It’s going to be one that other provinces in Canada are going to be watching very closely, and I suspect other places in the world.”

But Rymer said the details are still unclear, there is no mock-up of the exam, and there are challenges in developing the new assessment.

Numeracy and literacy are more broad than the simple English, math and science tests, he said.

And he said assessing “creativity” as a competency is fraught with problems, and trying to test it will more likely destroy it than enliven it.

The Alberta Teachers Association has for years railed against the achievement tests, arguing they stress students and teachers, and are used to unfairly compare schools.

The ATA president called the new student assessment a “historic announcement.”

“For too long, I believe, teachers have seen the detrimental side-effects related to a 30-year-old program,” Carol Henderson said. “We are very excited about this. This is a great time for students and their parents.”

There are suggestions the new assessment will make it harder to rank schools.

But the director of the Fraser Institute’s school performance studies says he sees nothing yet showing why the data couldn’t be used for the annual report cards on school performance produced by the institute.

“I’ve heard every criticism of the report card that ingenuity has been able to figure out over the last 15 years. Most of them are baseless,” Peter Cowley said.

One of the issues with the achievement tests is that inexperienced teachers, feeling pressure, will teach toward the test rather than the curriculum, according to Bryan Szumlas, a director in instructional services at the Calgary Catholic School District.

The school district supports where provincial student assessment is heading, he said, as it responds to many of the parent concerns heard during a broader education consultation a number of years ago.

“North America, in general, we get so caught up on a number, a percentage, to describe a particular child. And there’s so much more to it,” Szumlas said.

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